As the crew of Flight QF32 began to reconfigure the damaged A380 aircraft for landing in Singapore, they were bringing in the superjumbo without many of the systems they took for granted and with only one engine functioning normally.

Only the No 3 engine had reverse thrust, no leading edge slats were available, there was limited aileron and spoiler control and anti-skid braking was restricted, an Australian Transport Safety Bureau report said yesterday.

The nose wheel steering was limited and the pilots knew the nose was likely to pitch up on landing. A message from the airliner's central monitoring system indicated they could not apply maximum braking until the nose wheel was on the runway.

The pilots had already conducted tests to reassure themselves they could control the aircraft. But the captain knew he had to get the speed exactly right to avoid an aerodynamic stall that would rob the plane of lift or see it career off the end of the runway.

Calculations were that they would have just 100m of runway left when the A380 came to a halt and computer messages indicated two more of the four engines had been affected by the disintegration of the No 2 engine.

This left the captain using the No 1 and 4 engines to provide symmetric thrust while controlling the aircraft's speed using the unaffected No 3 engine.

The five crew -- there were two extra captains on board -- had already spent almost an hour dealing with a flurry of error messages that began as shrapnel from the No 2 engine tore through the wing, cutting wiring, hydraulic and fuel systems.

QANTAS is alleging in a multi-million-dollar damages claim against Rolls-Royce that it could now carry only 80 passengers across the Pacific in its Airbus 380s, under new operating rules for their troubled engines.

The airline states in Federal Court papers that it bought the Airbus superjumbos because they would carry 450 passengers and a payload of 60,900kg from Australia to Los Angeles.

But the new rules imposed by Rolls-Royce since one of its Trent 900 engines exploded on a Qantas A380 near Singapore last month mean that the world's biggest passenger jet is not a commercial proposition on the airline's Australia-US route.

Qantas, which has suspended the route, has asked for damages and costs.